The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

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Thursday, December 31, 2015

An in depth report of one European country's surge in anti-Semitism. One can extrapolate.

Nowadays the Netherlands is proving an abundant source for
anti-Semitism and anti-Israel hate mongering. We will limit ourselves
here to several recent events and incidents concerning Israel. These
occurred against the backdrop of an opinion poll which found that 38% of
the Dutch population believe that Israel is conducting a war of
extermination against the Palestinians.[1]
This and other radical lies concerning Israel reflect the result of the
widespread anti-Israel incitement in the Netherlands by left of center
parties, numerous media outlets, various NGOs, some Christian groups and
many others.

In October Youness Ouaali, a Turkish-Dutch representative of a Salafi charity World Wide Relief,[2]
suggested on his website that visiting Israeli tourists should be
beaten up. Pauw, a leading Dutch talk shows invited him to explain his
thoughts.[3]
A few days later the same talk show invited Constant Kusters, the
leader of the NVU, a tiny extreme right-wing party. Deputy Prime
Minister Lodewijk Asscher, a Labor party member, said in Parliament, “I
was shocked to see a neo-Nazi representing concerned citizens on
television.” [4] No such response was forthcoming from Asscher with regard to the incitement to beat up Israelis.

One
of the two annual Kristallnacht memorial meetings has become a regular
event for incitement against Israel. It is organized by a group that
hides its real views behind the innocuous-sounding name of “Platform for
anti-Racism.” This year it invited the anti-Israel Arab MK Haneen Zoabi
to speak.[5]
The meeting took place next to the Amsterdam monument for the Jewish
Resistance during the Holocaust, and prompted a petition asking the
Amsterdam Mayor and aldermen to no longer give permission to the
monument’s desecration through such anti-Israel gatherings.[6]

In
2015 a number of schoolbooks were published in The Netherlands
containing distortions of Israel’s history and activities. These
schoolbooks create bias against Israel among pupils by means of bogus
information. In May Noordhoff Uitgevers released a history book for
vocational high schools, which puts forward the suggestive claim that
David Ben Gurion declared Israeli statehood only after “Jewish militias
carried out murders in Arab villages, and hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians fled and settled in refugee camps across the border.” The
book makes no mention of any of the many documented Arab atrocities
toward Israelis, both over many years prior to Israel’s inception, and
during the war of Independence itself. [7]

Several
months later, another Dutch publisher, Thieme Meulenhoff, released a
high school textbook on the Middle East, which claimed that the Balfour
Declaration, promising a homeland in British Mandatory Palestine for the
Jews, was an attempt to woo Jewish bankers to invest in British war
efforts.[8]

The
same firm also published a geography textbook. Likoed Nederland, a
Dutch pro-Israel organization, discovered thirty-nine obvious errors in
the twelve pages about Israel. These included the lie that the Jews
refused the UN’s 1947 partition plan when the opposite was true: the
Arab nations refused it.[9]

In
July 2015, Bert Koenders, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs placed a
wreath at Yad Vashem. In the guestbook he wrote “discrimination and
anti-Semitism are still alive today. We owe it to the millions who were
murdered in the Holocaust to continue to fight this evil through
remembering the past and by educating today.”[10]

However,
when a motion to counter anti-Semitism within the educational system
was brought in Parliament, Koenders’ Labor party, the junior partner in
the government, opposed it. He has also firmly backed the labeling of
'West Bank' and the Golan products by the European Union. This is a
typical anti-Israel version of classic anti-Semitic double standards.[11]

In
June 2015 an anti-Israel debate took place at the major Amsterdam Free
University organized in coordination with the SRP, the Dutch Students
for Justice in Palestine. The theme of this was Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions. Only BDS supporters were allowed to speak freely. Opponents
were booed. At the end of the meeting, Jaap de Winter, the President of
the University’s Board, summarized this extremely biased discussion as
“a nice debate which befits the Free University.”[12]

The Amsterdam municipal council voted recently in favor of collaboration with Tel Aviv and Ramallah.[13]
The mayor of Amsterdam Eberhard Van der Laan, a member of the Labor
Party, is rightly proud of his parents, who were resistance activists
and helped Jews during the German occupation.[14]
This did not prevent him, however, from supporting the twinning of
Amsterdam and Ramallah, a city where murders of Jews are a frequent
occasion for official glorification.[15]
The municipal council imposed various constraints with regard to
collaboration with Tel Aviv, but collaboration with Ramallah apparently
required no preconditions.[16] This story in itself merits a separate article.Van
der Laan’s Labor Party colleague Ahmed Aboutaleb, mayor of Rotterdam,
prepared a trade mission to Israel. It was opposed in the municipal
council by the extreme left Socialist Party, the Green Left party and a
Muslim party NIDA. Aboutaleb responded that the possibility of such a
visit was still being looked into.[17]
Later in the year he visited Saudi Arabia. The Socialist Party and two
other parties opposed it. The Green Left and NIDA apparently did not
mind.[18]

The
reality in the Netherlands is such that most probably in a few months
more can be published on the same subject, as fresh examples on hate
mongering against and Israel in the Netherlands are emerging even as
this article is being written.Sources: